Can Plant Identification Apps Be Used for Foraging?

Books - The books and field guides I use are listed in the description of this other video: https://youtu.be/iHPW8Z323F0 IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT to use a book that is specific to your geographic region. A little elaboration on 'certainty' - because I'm not sure I really made the point very well in the video. When you, the amateur naturalist, are the one comparing features in a reference source against a specimen, you are inevitably beginning from a position of uncertainty and working toward certainty. The identification process is not just how you identify the plant, it's also integrally how you approach certainty that you got the identification right. Alternatively, the process falls short of certainty, because you fail along the way, and you know you aren't certain - you saw exactly this happen to me with the atypical hogweed specimen in this video. I tried to identify it, was confounded, and ended up uncertain. I think these apps are great. Use them. Get out there and look at amazing nature stuff! I just don't believe they are suited to making a life and death decision on your behalf.

I like that when Seek couldn't identify the plant with high confidence, it kept it vague, stopping at the last hierarchy it could confidently identify. I feel when you are talking about plants that's probably the safest option so the user doesn't make any assumptions. Its like saying to someone "I don't know what this is, but to avoid you doing something stupid, I'm not even going to tell you what I think it is so you don't even think about eating it.". I don't know, I feel like that's a good way to get around giving undue confidence to the person using the app, if only in a small way. In general, Seek seemed to have preformed the best, probably helped by its precise location service. I might pick it up, not to forage, but just to see what the plants around me are called. Especially since I don't have the botanical guide I bought for a plant ID class with me anymore.

My policy is: if it looks like parsley and it's not growing in my herb garden, I don't touch it! The edible members of apiaceae are pretty easy to grow from seed anyway. Certainly not worth risking your life on foraging them

I'm a US based truck driver. Watching your channel has made me curious about different plants and herbs I see at various rest areas. Since I don't have any books on the subject, I use apps like these to try to identify some of them. I make my own observations in a notebook and take detailed pictures. When I'm home, I stop at the library to see if the identification I was given was correct or if I disagree. I find it a fun challenge for myself in general.

It would be nice if they had an extra layer of "everything in this plant family is non-toxic" or "this plant is easily confused with a toxic look-alike which is found in your area" (or "which is not found in your area") so you know that something is safe to pick and/or eat, even if the app has the exact name wrong, or that it's best not to chance it. I made an edible plant ID guide for myself based on plants that I had seen (or thought I had seen) in my general area, and if there was a toxic look-alike, like poison hemlock, I put it side by side with the edible plant so I could tell the difference between the two.

I found an app that is great in helping identify plants, unfortunately it's in Czech so not very useful outside of here....but instead of picture id, it asks questions starting with flower colour and month, then shape of leaves and their position and so on....narrowing down the possibilities to a list. Very helpful for a beginner like myself and I still feel like I'm learning! A similar app in English, with more questions and plants would be amazing.

Wildly off-topic, but I do love how cheerfully brambles intermarry to produce interesting new berries. There's a Victorian graveyard down my way and the very oldest portion of it is overgrown with an impenetrable collection of not-quite-raspberries, not-quite-blackberries, not-quite-dewberries, growing all around a variety of wild apple trees. In autumn the magpies feast, and get rascally drunk on the over-ripe fruits and berries

I had some friends that went camping and they all decided to live off the land. What they thought was wild Garlic turned out to be Death Camas and they all wound-up in the hospital having their stomachs pumped. I used to be a fan of wild mushrooms until I became very ill one day. I was lucky, it could have been worse. If you are miles from civilization and you become ill, for whatever reason, it may ruin more than your vacation. Use caution.

Firstly- I'm a big fan of the trend of answering the title in the thumbnail. It brings me in not to hear the answer, but to hear an explanation of why it's the answer :) Secondly- I personally like the apps most for identifying plants in a garden or park, say if you wanted to grow a certain flower at your own place but weren't sure what it was. For things that don't really matter, and just give you a starting point in your search, as you said

There are a ton of factors I can think of that would be crucial to differentiating between plant species that even seasoned experts wouldn't be able to evaluate through an image/video. What does it smell like? Is the sap milky or clear? What is the stem shape? Round, lenticular, triangular, square, etc? Where is it growing? And so on. Those are super important factors to making a proper identification.

If the plant identifying app really wanted to be very good at it's job, it would use the image and initial search only as a kicking off point. Ideally after that it could start asking questions and walking you through how to do the rest of the identification with all the other details that plant ID books would have you compare. I have no personal experience with foraging, but this is just what my personal takeaway from this review is.

great video!! i took a plant identification-based course at school recently, and our TA’s philosophy on these apps were that they were a good place to start when you’re really stuck on a plant or don’t want to walk through a huge dichotomous key, but that we should always look into the finer details of the plant and use our books for the final identification steps. i also just like using plantnet when ive found something that looked interesting and wanted to quickly ID it in the moment without fretting too much over botanical details — yesterday i found a great looking specimen of oakleaf goosefoot, which i’d never seen before. thank you for promoting safe foraging practices — having spent a lot of time looking at amateur forager forums online, i can say that the amount of people harvesting incorrect plants is alarming. i wish more people would approach it with the level of care you have.

Seek is what got me interested in foraging, but it was because I saw the limitations the app had and decided I didn't want to rely on technology when I'm out and about. It was really interesting to see how it matches up with other popular foraging apps!

I haven't used these apps in a while but from what I remember about them my two main issues where 1. The general rule seemed to be that if I couldn't confidentiality identify a plant neither could they 2. A lot of them seemed to assume I was in America, which obviously affects the results. The ones in the video ask for your location so I guess that's been fixed But yeah, there should definitely be a warning, something like "one of the possible matches is highly poisonous"

My favorite thing about you and your channel is how successful you are without pigeonholing yourself into one type of content. It's what I aspire to for my channel.

My favourite bit is that the B roll is Bee roll. You’re awesome Atomic Shrimp!

Re the Hogweed, Heracleum sphondylium, Common Hogweed can certainly grow that high, and the leaves, from the brief look, seem within the range of variation to be found. The umbels of Giant Hogweed are usually absurdly large things. Naturally the two species do hybridise, but only very rarely. Hampshire is home to a lot of good botanists who could give you a definite answer.

I love that your field guide has colored illustrations. In my experience, and opinion, pictures of plants are usually really poor, being too grainy, poorly lit, too far away, and so on. They also don't show all the details. Good illustrations have none of those problems, and are quite charming. The field guide I have for my area uses tiny pictures. I wonder if I can find a better one.

I wish we got taught all this stuff in school, it would be awesome to go outside and learn some stuff that could be genuinely useful and even life saving at times. Knowledge every person should have, like what plants can be made in to a poultice or what mushrooms are edible if you're lost in the wilderness.

Hi Mike, this is probably a strange place to express my appreciation, but thank you for the work that you do! I always had a love for ecology (and thrifty cooking), and your foraging/botany videos were a part of my inspiration to change direction several years into my career. Funnily enough, I worked in IT management too, but your knowledge and love of nature helped me reconsider my goals. I'm now studying socio-environmental change and have never been happier. Wish you the best!